Chapter 13

Washington D.C.

Kara rode back on the bus, trying to work out what she was going to do. There were a lot of things she needed to work out before she could do something about Packer. She’d already talked to Robles about him, and she was certain that if something suddenly happened to Packer, Robles would notice and put it together. She had to be smart about it like Taylor would.

She got home and headed up to her room after she and her best-friend slash roommate agreed on what to get for dinner. She popped her window open and looked over the security system connection. When they’d moved in, Taylor, being the paranoid over-planner that he was, had given the security system a once over, and explained it to her as he did. Of course, it was unlikely that he would have realized his off-the-cuff explanations would have helped her circumvent them a year and a half later, but here she was. The window alarm sensor was basically two rectangular pieces of plastic that used magnets to trip a switch. When the magnet was in place, it completed the circuit and the alarm showed the window as closed, and when the magnet was moved, the circuit would break and the alarm system would notice it.

Taylor had then gone on a rant about how surprised he was that the expensive security that Mary Jane’s mother had paid before she started getting Secret Service protection had used something like this and not something less able to be tampered with. He admitted that the thickness of the wood on the window would make it hard for someone to trick the sensor from the outside, but someone on the inside could disable it using another magnet to fool the sensor into not switching.

Kara had stopped by a hardware store on the way home and gotten a flat, strong magnet that she hoped would do the job. She put the magnet in place and carefully closed the window, so it wouldn’t dislodge her decoy, and then went to have dinner.

Kara spent the entire meal very concisely trying to stay in the moment and hold conversations while her brain was several miles away, worrying about Packer and thinking over her plan for getting in and out of the house without being seen. Mary Jane did ask once or twice if everything was all right, but Kara played it off as being distracted about stuff at school, and let Mary Jane make her own assumptions from there, probably thinking it had something to do with a boy.

It always amazed Kara how her friend had bounced back from their ordeal in Russia, although she hadn’t actually been abused in any way. It had been terrifying and she had her own trauma from it, but nothing had happened to put her off dating. While she hadn’t returned to her partying lifestyle, she’d started dating again a few months later and guys were something she thought about a lot. Kara had zero interest in guys, or anyone for that matter, which was something Mary Jane had never been able to wrap her head around.

They finished up dinner and Kara said she was tired from a long day and excused herself. Once in her room, Kara changed out of the jeans and t-shirt she’d been wearing and into a dark hoodie without writing or identifying marks on it, and dark pants. The time ticked by slowly as she waited. She needed to run a test on the alarm and she needed everyone asleep before she made her move. It was getting to be early morning in Somalia and she worried that the later she waited, the more chance Packer could okay the hit he’d put out on Taylor. The only thing she had going for her was Packer saying he wanted to talk to the person before agreeing to pay them for it.

She heard Mary Jane go to bed and was pretty sure the alarm had been set. Thankfully, as an adult child, her friend only had a couple of agents at any given time, and it wasn’t enough for stuff like regular patrols around the house or anything. Her first step was to test if she’d really disabled the alarm or not. Holding the magnet in place, she pushed the window open and listened for several minutes.

She’d accidentally done this a few months before, opening her window for fresh air late at night, setting off the alarm. One of the agents had come and knocked on her door, asking her if everything was alright and if she just opened her window, so she had an idea of what their response time would be. Time ticked by as she waited three times longer than that, just to be sure. No one came to check on her or ask about the open window. It wasn’t a hundred percent proof, but it would have to do.

She was on the second floor, but that wasn’t a significant problem, since her room was above the dining room, which had this nice bay window, whose roof sloped down, getting her halfway to the ground before she had to jump off. She was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to hold the weight of a person, but she was very light, usually hovering around ninety pounds. Still, she lowered herself gingerly to the outcropping roof and tested it before putting her weight completely on it. Thankfully, it held as she reached up and pulled her window most of the way down, just short of bumping against the magnet, since she didn’t want to accidentally dislodge it while she was outside.

The lights were off in the dining room as she swung her head down and looked around, checking that the coast was clear, before making the short hop to the ground. And just like that, she was on the ground.

A brick wall ran around the house, which wasn’t a problem. She hoisted herself over it and went through their rear neighbor’s yard and out to the street. Step two was getting to Packer. She’d paid enough attention when Taylor and Whitaker had discussed cases that she knew police could backtrack things like taxis and buses once they had a suspect, so she walked a mile before flagging down a cab, making sure to do it on a major road, to make it that much harder to track the ride back to her. She sat back as the driver took her to a spot not far from Packer’s apartment and collected herself for the next step of her plan.

Wajideeb, Somalia

Taylor paced the small hut they’d shoved him in, and chewed on the problem. He’d gotten a good look at the village both getting into the central building and as they marched him to their single room prison, and the odds of making an escape didn’t seem good.

He might be able to get past the two guys standing outside the hut guarding him, and the village itself still had just gotten started for a day, which meant people bustling everywhere. He might have a chance if they held him all day and through the night, when maybe he could get away in the dark, but the way Gehdi spoke, it didn’t seem like he’d have that much time.

Taylor had known he was taking a serious risk when he walked into the village and he’d planned out several ways this could have gone bad, but finding out someone had put a bounty on his head specifically had not occurred to him. The only real option was to appeal to his captor’s mercenary nature, but he didn’t know who he was bidding against or how much they’d offered up for grabbing him. While he was prepared to commit to money he’d have to get from Wheeler, since he was confident that the CIA, or at least Wheeler, wanted this targeting system bad enough to be willing to throw some money at it, he’d have to find a way to convince Gehdi that he could make good on the money before Gehdi was able to kill him, which was going to be tough.

Taylor had pissed off a lot of people over the years so the list of people who’d want to put a bounty on his head was pretty large, but the timing was a little too specific for anyone but Northbridge. What Taylor couldn’t figure out is why they let him come if they were just going to kill him off. It was possible they really hadn’t had a choice without others in the company getting wise to what was happening, which supported the idea that a group working inside Northbridge were behind the targeting system being sold off, something they wouldn’t have wanted others at the company to learn about. If that were the case then it would make sense to get rid of Taylor in a way that looked like he’d died as a casualty during the rescue attempt rather than stonewall his involvement entirely.